General News
31 July, 2019
Bloods fall short against Roos
TERANG Mortlake midfielder Jarryd Hay found a silver lining in his side’s performance despite a narrow loss to Hamilton Kangaroos last Saturday.
TERANG Mortlake midfielder Jarryd Hay found a silver lining in his side’s performance despite a narrow loss to Hamilton Kangaroos last Saturday.
For one of the few times this season, the Bloods put together a consistent four quarter effort despite the scoreboard indicating a five point defeat.
“Going by the scoreboard it looks disappointing but I guess at one stage we were four goals down and in previous games that would have blown out to a 50 or 60 point loss,” Hay said.
“We sort of took plenty of positives out of that, we dug in and made sure that it didn’t turn into a blow-out.”
The Kangaroos controlled the contest early, opening up a handy lead which grew to 23 points at the main break.
But the second half was a totally different story, with the Bloods kicking three goals to one in the third quarter to reduce the margin to 13 points at the final change.
Both sides hit the scoreboard regularly in the last quarter, but the Kangaroos managed to kick three goals to the Bloods’ four to assure themselves of an 11.8 (74) to 10.9 (69) victory.
Hay said the performance was a step in the right direction for a predominantly youthful Bloods team.
But he said it was disappointing they had not been able to string together those performances more consistently despite proving they were capable of doing so.
“We had a 17 year-old and an 18 year-old on debut and a heap of other young kids playing so you can expect there to be games where you’re up and down and that,” he said.
“But it was good to show these kids that we can dig in but we’ve now just got to keep putting four quarter performances together.
“We probably haven’t done it much this year, against Camperdown was probably the only time we have and that was definitely a big effort.
“We pride ourselves on our contested footy but we’ve only been doing it for two or three quarters so for the rest of the year we’ve got to make sure we’re doing it for four.”
Terang Mortlake is now set to front up for another winnable contest this weekend, this time against South Warrnambool at Friendly Societies Park.
Hay said the Bloods were expecting the Roosters to respond strongly off the back of poor recent form but knows they need to take away a key component of their opponent’s game plan to score victory.
“South are obviously going to want to bounce back, they haven’t been going all that great so they’ll probably come out firing and we’re sort of preparing for them to do that,” he said.
“But as I said, contested football will be the key (to us winning), they like to chip it around and play that type of game style.
“But if we can put the pressure on the ball carrier then that will go a long way to giving us a result.”